Lawsuit claims a flawed performance review and vanishing pipeline accounts ended a top producer's career
Google is facing a race discrimination lawsuit from a former cloud salesman who says he was fired despite hitting his numbers.
Jason Cummings filed his complaint on May 14 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. According to the filing, he worked as a Level 6 Field Service Representative from December 2022 until August 2025, selling cloud technology to local government and education clients across the state.
The complaint says Cummings was the only non-White FSR in Google's Midwest Central region. He reported to Joel Pingel, Head of Education, State and Local Government, who the filing says supervised at least five other FSRs. Cummings alleges Pingel was hostile from the start and held back the kind of support offered to his White colleagues.
The complaint paints a picture of strong performance met with quiet sabotage. In 2023, his first full year, Cummings says he closed a $2.3 million deal, doubled his revenue, and opened a line to the City of Chicago's mayor's office. In January 2024, the filing states, Pingel reassigned his biggest account to a White colleague who, according to the complaint, had less public-sector experience.
Cummings says he kept producing anyway. The filing alleges he placed a deal worth more than $100 million into the 2024 pipeline, exceeded his targets, and earned Cloud Value Advisor recognition, a peer recognition award, and a Cloud Digital Leader Certification in 2025.
Then came the review. In mid-June 2025, Cummings alleges, Pingel posted a negative evaluation citing weak metrics - one the complaint says was "replete with mistakes and falsehoods," applying the wrong measures and misstating both his revenue and his pipeline. After the review went up, according to the filing, accounts Cummings had logged in Google's internal databases began disappearing. The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that Pingel was behind the deletions.
The filing also describes what Cummings calls demeaning treatment from leadership. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering and an MBA in Finance, but the complaint says Pingel and senior leaders preferred to talk about his college football days. The filing further alleges that the new managing director, Matt Schneider, commented in Cummings's presence about his daughter's sorority becoming more racially integrated and ethnically diverse because it had admitted a brunette to what had been an all-White sorority.
Other incidents are detailed in the filing. Cummings says Pingel tried to insert another FSR, who is White, into a client relationship he had developed, then publicly criticized him for not knowing the colleague's role - a role Pingel had never defined, the complaint says. The filing also says Pingel falsely accused him in a team chat of failing to give a new customer engineer calendar access; the engineer then confirmed the access had been given.
Google fired Cummings on August 5, 2025, citing poor productivity. He alleges he was on pace to meet or exceed his 2025 targets. According to the complaint, only one other FSR in the region was outperforming him at the time, that person had considerably more years of experience selling cloud technology, and that person had also not yet hit his targets.
For HR teams, the case is a reminder of how performance management can become the centerpiece of a discrimination claim. Cummings's lawyers will argue that the negative review, the disappearing pipeline accounts, and the reassigned client were not isolated calls but a pattern - one that ended in the termination of the only non-White rep on the team.
Cummings brings claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, and the Illinois Human Rights Act. The filing says he filed a timely EEOC charge and received a Right-to-Sue Notice before suing. He is seeking back pay, front pay, compensatory and punitive damages, and injunctive relief that includes training, policy revisions, record corrections, and neutral references.
The allegations have not been tested in court. Google has not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled on the claims.
